Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts

Why we enjoy works of art, and how repetition plays a central part in the pleasure we receive.

Leonard Bernstein, in his famous Norton Lectures, extolled repetition, saying that it gave poetry its musical qualities and that music theorists' refusal to take it seriously did so at their peril.

Play It Again, Sam takes Bernstein seriously. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser explores in detail the way repetition works in poetry, music, and painting. He argues, for example, that the same cognitive fu...